Towards an end-to-end analysis and prediction system for weather, climate, and Marine applications in the Red Sea

AbstractThe Red Sea, home to the second-longest coral reef system in the world, is a vital resource for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Red Sea provides 90% of the Kingdom’s potable water by desalinization, supporting tourism, shipping, aquaculture, and fishing industries, which together contribute about 10%–20% of the country’s GDP. All these activities, and those elsewhere in the Red Sea region, critically depend on oceanic and atmospheric conditions. At a time of mega-development projects along the Red Sea coast, and global warming, authorities are working on optimizing the harnessing of environmental resources, including renewable energy and rainwater harvesting. All these require high-resolution weather and climate information. Toward this end, we have undertaken a multipronged research and development activity in which we are developing an integrated data-driven regional coupled modeling system. The telescopically nested components include 5-km- to 600-m-resolution atmospheric models to address weather and climate challenges, 4-km- to 50-m-resolution ocean models with regional and coastal configurations to simulate and predict the general and mesoscale circulation, 4-km- to 100-m-resolution ecosystem models to simulate the biogeochemistry, and 1-km- to 50-m-resolution wave models. In addition, a complementary probabilistic transport modeling system predicts dispersion of contaminant plumes, oil spill, and marine ecosystem connectivity. Advanced ensemble data assimilation capabilities have also been implemented for accurate forecasting. Resulting achievements include significant advancement in our understanding of the regional circulation and its connection to the global climate, development, and validation of long-term Red Sea regional atmospheric–oceanic–wave reanalyses and forecasting capacities. These products are being extensively used by academia, government, and industry in various weather and marine studies and operations, environmental policies, renewable energy applications, impact assessment, flood forecasting, and more.</jats:p

Towards an end-to-end analysis and prediction system for weather, climate, and marine applications in the Red Sea

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 102(1), (2021): E99-E122, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0005.1.The Red Sea, home to the second-longest coral reef system in the world, is a vital resource for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Red Sea provides 90% of the Kingdom’s potable water by desalinization, supporting tourism, shipping, aquaculture, and fishing industries, which together contribute about 10%–20% of the country’s GDP. All these activities, and those elsewhere in the Red Sea region, critically depend on oceanic and atmospheric conditions. At a time of mega-development projects along the Red Sea coast, and global warming, authorities are working on optimizing the harnessing of environmental resources, including renewable energy and rainwater harvesting. All these require high-resolution weather and climate information. Toward this end, we have undertaken a multipronged research and development activity in which we are developing an integrated data-driven regional coupled modeling system. The telescopically nested components include 5-km- to 600-m-resolution atmospheric models to address weather and climate challenges, 4-km- to 50-m-resolution ocean models with regional and coastal configurations to simulate and predict the general and mesoscale circulation, 4-km- to 100-m-resolution ecosystem models to simulate the biogeochemistry, and 1-km- to 50-m-resolution wave models. In addition, a complementary probabilistic transport modeling system predicts dispersion of contaminant plumes, oil spill, and marine ecosystem connectivity. Advanced ensemble data assimilation capabilities have also been implemented for accurate forecasting. Resulting achievements include significant advancement in our understanding of the regional circulation and its connection to the global climate, development, and validation of long-term Red Sea regional atmospheric–oceanic–wave reanalyses and forecasting capacities. These products are being extensively used by academia, government, and industry in various weather and marine studies and operations, environmental policies, renewable energy applications, impact assessment, flood forecasting, and more.The development of the Red Sea modeling system is being supported by the Virtual Red Sea Initiative and the Competitive Research Grants (CRG) program from the Office of Sponsored Research at KAUST, Saudi Aramco Company through the Saudi ARAMCO Marine Environmental Center at KAUST, and by funds from KAEC, NEOM, and RSP through Beacon Development Company at KAUST

Conservative management of idiopathic pulmonary artery aneurysm

Pulmonary artery aneurysm is rare condition. Different etiologies have been reviewed, but idiopathic lesions without other symptoms are seldom reported. We report the case of a 73-year-old female with idiopathic main pulmonary artery aneurysm of 54 mm. There was no other accompanying abnormality. Because the patient was old, had no severe symptoms and there were no signs of aneurysmic compression or a shunt, initial considerations of surgical intervention were turned down. This report highlights a case of conservative management of such affected patients, with regular follow-up

Upper Silesian system of information about surface hazards on abandoned mining areas

Tereny Górnego Śląska ze względu na duże zasoby surowców mineralnych podlegały w przeszłości, i podlegają obecnie, silnej presji górniczej. Jednocześnie są to tereny, które uległy silnym procesom urbanizacji i znaczna ich część wykorzystywana jest na cele budowlane. Dokonana działalność górnicza spowodowała trwałe przeobrażenie naturalnego środowiska geologicznego. Obejmuje ono szereg cech strukturalnych oraz własności fizykochemicznych i mechanicznych utworów geologicznych a także zaburzenie w rozkładzie pola grawitacji ziemskiej. Pole to jest zasadniczą przyczyną procesów geodynamicznych kształtujących równowagę mechaniczną w litosferze. Konsekwencją przeobrażenia jest istnienie potencjalnego zagrożenia niestabilnością powierzchni terenów dokonanej eksploatacji (deformacje) a w szczególności obszarów, w których eksploatację surowców prowadzono na małej głębokości. Potencjalna niestabilność powierzchni stwarza zagrożenie bezpieczeństwa zarówno dla ludzi, jak i obiektów budowlanych. W artykule opisano projekt informatyczny realizowany w Laboratorium Geofizyki Inżynierskiej Głównego Instytutu Górnictwa mający na celu udokumentowanie dokonanej płytkiej eksploatacji górniczej węgla i rud metali na współczesnych mapach powierzchni oraz udostępnienie tej informacji w przestrzeni publicznej w postaci portalu internetowego zapadliska.gig.eu . Strona funkcjonuje na serwerze Głównego Instytutu Górnictwa pod nazwą „Górnośląski System Informacji o Zagrożeniach Powierzchni na Terenach Zlikwidowanych Kopalń”. W 2015 roku zrealizowano pierwszy etap projektu obejmujący kwerendę map górniczych północno-wschodniej części Górnośląskiego Zagłębia Węglowego, tj. Zagłębia Dąbrowskiego oraz rejonu jaworznicko-chrzanowskiego. W artykule opisano strukturę informatyczną projektu oraz wykorzystane zasoby danych kartograficznych i geologiczno-górniczych w celu jego realizacji.Due to the large deposits of mineral resources, the Upper Silesia Area has been under strong mining pressure for the past several centuries. Nowadays, as the mines are abandoned, many post-mining regions are intended for revitalization and investments such as housing development and industrial building. The mining exploitation left transformations in the natural geological environment which have an impact on the geotechnical conditions. This includes a number of structural, physico-chemical and mechanical features of geological formations as well as disturbances in the distribution of the Earth’s gravity field. This field is the principal cause of geodynamic processes affecting the mechanical equilibrium in the lithosphere. As a consequence of mining exploitation in post mining areas surface deformations may occur, especially in places where mine extraction was conducted on a low depths. Potential surface hazards determine the safety for civil and building engineering. The main goal of the project which is developed in the Central Mining Institute is to record the areas of old shallow (up to 100 m) coal and ore exploitation on present cartographical maps. The results of the work will be presented on the website (zapadliska.gig.eu) working on the Central Mining Institute’s server. The first stage of the project focused on collecting the data from the North-East part of Upper Silesia was conducted in 2015. The structure of the project’s website and used resources of cartographical, geological and mining data has been described in the article

Evaluation of next generation of high-order compressible fluid dynamic solvers on the cloud computing for complex industrial flows

Industrially relevant computational fluid dynamics simulations frequently require vast computational resources that are only available to governments, wealthy corporations, and wealthy institutions. Thus, in many contexts and realities, high-performance computing grids and cloud resources on demand should be evaluated as viable alternatives to conventional computing clusters. In this work, we present the analysis of the time-to-solution and cost of an entropy stable collocated discontinuous Galerkin (SSDC) compressible computational fluid dynamics framework on Ibex, the on-premises cluster at KAUST, and the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud for complex compressible flows. SSDC is a prototype of the next generation computational fluid dynamics frameworks developed following the road map established by the NASA CFD vision 2030. We simulate complex flow problems using high-order accurate fully-discrete entropy stable algorithms. In terms of time-to-solution, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud delivers the best performance, with the Graviton2 processors based on the Arm architecture being the fastest. However, the results also indicate that the Ibex nodes based on the AMD Rome architecture deliver good performance, close to those observed for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Furthermore, we observed that computations performed on the Ibex on-premises cluster are currently less expensive than those performed in the cloud. Our findings could be used to develop guidelines for selecting high-performance computing cloud resources to simulate realistic fluid flow problems